Joy Gugeler's Blog

Posted by Joy Gugeler

Everywhere you look these days someone is trying to entice you with the lure of a free gift upfront in an effort to inspire a more sizable purchase down the road. Of course this is nothing new, offline or on, but what is new is that the Web 2.0 generation has fast developed zero tolerance for paying period (even the hassle of a penny can defer a sale) when it comes to access.

Paywalls and premium fees are passé thanks to some big players who have dropped the threshold. From the New York Times to Radiohead, McSweeney's to Google (reigning champion of all free all the time), the new online economy (“freeconomics”) has shifted from charging per unit (issue, CD, read, search) to taking the gamble that short-term pain (loss) is long-term gain.

Because information wants to be free (ask a librarian) as does art, many creators of both are opting for forsaking product charges in exchange for whetting the appetite of audiences who show up in droves when viral marketing gets the word out. Once they arrive, the new converts either pay for tickets, swag, limited editions or bonus features or they generate enough interest for advertisers to bring in dollars for the creator through a different door.

Now that’s a revolution I can get behind. After all, publishers have long managed to subsidize the cost of printing with advertising commissions (or, for Canadians, grants :))- subscriptions and newsstand sales were often gravy – and let’s face it, once it’s made, it’s all about volume and scale to convert readers to revenue. The real lever is not actual value, but perceived value.

If, as my dad used to say, experts were people who knew more and more about less and less, then the Web is expert in hosting more and more for less and less. But, in an online environment of such abundance, how do we value what’s worth having?

Anderson sums it up nicely when he says, “… money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The ‘attention economy’ and ‘reputation economy’… Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads).”

This got me to thinking about the business model for Suite, an example of how charging a third-party - advertisers looking for individuals primed by search - to subsidize what amounts to public education keeps the burden of cost off the taxpayer and reader and still lines the pockets of shareholders and writers.

If this means good writers get an opportunity to publish for pay for audiences hungry for that rare commodity – good content – then the enterprise is inherently valuable. The real trick for writers, and always has been, is how to consistently deliver time well spent, and that is a trick worth learning.

Posted by Joy Gugeler

Since Gutenberg (1439 to its latest incarnation) publishers have excelled at finding and developing editorial talent and producing books that feed the need for both art and information. So why haven't audiences and sales registered their appreciation at the till? While there are a myriad of factors that contribute to the complexity of the book industry, if we were really honest we'd admit that we're better at making books than selling them.

Meanwhile, the explosion of the Web and its huge but fractured audience has made individual contact with readers, existing and potential, possible at the stroke of a key, but the Net as a content provider consistently disappoints as a medium rife with trustworthy editorial leaving readers at loose ends as they search for needles in haystacks. Consider what would happen if these two industries joined forces to share content and market without sacrificing brand and ownership.

Canadian publishers, and their American counterparts, are in possession of thousands of titles and professional and expert writers have no shortage of content, but can't afford to rely on the whimsy, discounts, returns policies, poor exchange rate, and short shelf life of just traditional stores and an abbreviated season to recoup their costs and get the word out.

Online sites are so desperate for content they're relying on aggregated and anonymous content from questionable sources to draw readers and advertisers. Can these two industries scratch each other's backs and finally offer readers of both formats what they need and want?

Of course they can, if they’d just talk to each other. A little liaising, an open mind, the right contractual agreements and some imagination - territorialism parked at the door - would go a long way to making online content stronger and book sales more robust.

-Joy Gugeler

Posted by Joy Gugeler

More often than not, the 21-year-old intern frustrated with the glacial rate of change in- house at established book and magazine pubishers, pipes up at a meeting and says, outrageously and not without repercussions, “What about a podcast on youtube? What about an author drop-in on Second Life? What about a text-a-thon with the 12-15 set on Myspace?” only to be met with glazed expressions and eye-rolling from the 30-40-something marketing department that assumes this costs too much of the green and will take nothing short of a Peter Jackson- style orchestration to pull off.

How wrong they are. With a username, a game plan, and digital camera and a healthy dose of mischief all of this can be accomplished in a few hours to reach thousands and best of all, it’s trackable. The Web is one of the few places publishers actually have live stats about usage from pageviews, to screen time, to referring sites, to click-through rates.

Rather than rely on instinct and a focus group that includes your mother, why not throw up 20% of the book’s content in new form (you name it, it’s there) or have the author craft a handy companion piece, and see what the bait draws?

These sites, and sites like our own, have higher page rank, more content, longer histories, and highly-optimized pages, so why wouldn’t they be a better magnet for drawing search or direct load traffic than the standard catalogue-plus-shopping-cart construction most presses have on offer?

This is no time for proprietary stake holding, publishers need to think outside the book and get out there and share – and we don’t mean a free bookmark.

Nobody does a better job of finding and developing the talent than the editorial teams at respected book and magazine publishers, but let’s face it, marketing has always been an afterthought and an uphill battle for all but the already best-selling and megabrands.

Democracy has come to the Net and now the beloved but overlooked book deep in the mid or backlist can find its readers again and again by making the expertise readily available one article, video, or podcast at a time.

Think I’m all talk? Post your success stories here and prove me right. For that matter, post your failures and tell me what you’d have done differently. I’d venture to say most books don’t get thousands of pageviews a day on Amazon or the publisher site, but an article that’s relevant, timely, and plain-speaking when you just need to know – I’ll take that, with the book to go.

--Joy

Posted by Joy Gugeler

Posted by Joy Gugeler

It's official! Suite101 has landed at Book Expo America in Los Angeles. We're here from May 29th to June 1st. Drop in and say hi, then grab some lime green Suite "swag" at booth #5455. I'm joined by Holly, Marci and Peter. Watch for updated blog posts from the floor soon--